hello and welcome to a special episode of after skool i'm andrew huberman professor of
neurobiology and ophthalmology at stanford school of medicine i'm also the host of the hubermann
lab podcast a weekly podcast focused on science and science-based tools for everyday life today
you're going to learn about practical tools for optimizing your morning routine so without further
ado practical tools for optimizing your morning routine there are certain foundational behaviors
do's and don'ts that set the stage for you to be better at everything so a lot of times people
say how can i lift more focus better remember things better it's like well let's think about
the foundation of that and that's always going to come back to two elements and
that's sleep and what i call non-sleep deep rest so sleep is the fundamental
practice or part of our 24-hour cycle where if you don't get it on a consistent basis you
are down regulating your ability to do everything right metabolism is screwed up immune system is
screwed up etc etc however it is not the case if you get a one night's bad sleep or that if
you're not sleeping perfectly that you can't perform well but let's talk about sleep and just
because i think it's important the goal for most people unless you're pulling vampire shifts on
on deployment or you're a shift worker and thank you shift workers we'll talk about shift work
you should try and get really good sleep eighty percent of the time eight percent of the nights
of your life the other twenty percent i hope you're not getting good sleep for good reasons
that you enjoy but the point is that there are a couple things that you can do first of all
every cell in your body has a circadian rhythm meaning every cell has a 24-hour circadian clock
that's regulated by genes think of these your body is a bunch of millions of clock to need to align
those clocks to a single time this is why when you travel overseas your gut goes off or it's
more easy you more easily you get sick or uh your thinking isn't quite right the clocks aren't in
alignment they're not entrained as we say number one practice for everything sleep especially is
try and get some natural light in your eyes within an hour of waking up if you wake up before the sun
turn on a bunch of bright lights and then get sunlight in your eyes once it comes out
if there's dense cloud cover there are still more photons light energy
coming through that cloud cover than there are coming from artificial lights so try and get
five to ten minutes without sunglasses outside in the morning once the sun is out
most days if not all days this has an outsized effect on a number of things first of all it
modulates the timing of what's called the cortisol pulse once every 24 hours you're going to get a
boost in cortisol big spike in cortisol it's a healthy boost it sets your temperature rhythm
in motion sets your level of alertness your level of focus and your mood you want that
cortisol pulse to happen as early in the day as once what's triggering the cortisol pulse
the cortisol pulse is naturally entrained by these genetic programs to happen once every 24 hours but
light will anchor it to the period where you see bright light got it a late-shifted cortisol pulse
so imagine the kid that wakes up and spends the morning in bed or you spend the morning bedding
you're texting or you're indoors and you're typing on the computer that's not enough light to
accomplish what i'm talking about and then you go outside around noon or one you're in what's called
the circadian dead zone which is the time in which light arriving at the eyes can do certain things
but it can't time this pulse that means that cortisol pulse is going to come in the afternoon
which means that your temperature rhythm is going to be shifted late and that's actually a signature
of depression and anxiety and difficulty falling asleep many people are waking up and they're just
spending time indoors and they're putting on sunglasses getting in their car and driving or
there's cloud cover and they think there's no sun out i don't mean that you actually have to stare
at the sun never stare at any light so bright it's going to damage you please don't and blink as
necessary but the indirect rays from the from sun trigger these cells in the eyes called melanopsin
ganglion cells these ganglion cells these are our neurons they send a signal to your hypothalamus
then the hypothalamus releases this peptide which is a wake-up signal for your whole brain and body
and sets a timer for the onset of melatonin release 16 hours later melatonin being the
hormone that makes you sleepy and makes you want to go to sleep so you can imagine what happens if
you don't get that light until a few hours later everything shifted and then you want to go to st
you don't know why you're wide awake at 11 30 or 12 and everything's messed up the other thing is
that you can get bright light from electronic devices early in the day but it's not enough
you need photons from sunlight now if you live in scandinavia in the depths of winter if you're up
in like you know trondheim or ohus or something like okay fine don't buy an expensive daytime
simulator get one of these led light boxes for drawing they're very inexpensive in comparison you
find them on amazon i don't have a relationship to any of these brands but they're easy to find
20 30 bucks put that on your desk and just look at that thing for a few minutes in the morning
not as good but better than being in the darkness then when the sun's out get outside
now this is a huge huge effect for the following reason the signal that arrives from the eyes to
the hypothalamus also triggers the release of the neuromodulator dopamine we hear about dopamine as
a feel-good molecule dopamine dopamine dopamine dopamine hits but dopamine's main role in the
brain and body is to drive motivation craving and pursuit it is not the molecule of pleasure
it is the molecule of drive it is life force dopamine is actually the molecule from which
adrenaline epinephrine is manufactured and you may notice you said we crave sun it also does make you
feel good here's why if you think about seasonally breeding animals let's think about the arctic fox
well the arctic fox in winter is white but in the summertime has darker pellets it actually there's
a pathway going from sunlight to dopamine to melanin production in the skin in fur so
animals that transition from light color to dark color that's all mediated by dopamine guess what
else happens the gonads grow there are animals that i've worked on in the laboratory and that
also in humans it's now been shown in a beautiful study that people who get
20 to 30 minutes of light on their skin this was a study done in israel so they wear an appropriate
amount of clothing but they're sleeveless no hat no sunglasses they were told to go outside
20 or 30 minutes three times a week just in the sunshine ideally they were shorts also
they measure testosterone and estrogen in men and women significant increases in both and
all the associated things of increased passion blah blah blah that is what they measured in the
study why well it turns out that light to the eyes but also light to the skin the skin is an
endocrine organ it's not just something to tattoo and hang earrings from and put clothing on and
actually there's a pathway involving a molecule called p53 and the keratinocytes are these skin
cells that when sunlight when uvb ultraviolet blue light penetrates the skin because it can
penetrate the skin superficially triggers these keratinocytes to stimulate a pathway that releases
dopamine in the brain and body so you feel better when you're getting light in your eyes and on
your skin and you're increasing testosterone and epinephrine and dopamine increase that's
why you feel good in the summer months people in scandinavia know this this kind of spring fever
in the winter months you want to go through every bit of effort to double or triple the amount of
time that you're spending outside in the morning so instead of 10 minutes make it 30 minutes
we all are familiar with getting sleepy and falling asleep that's the parasympathetic
nervous system taking over the longer we are awake the longer the buildup of something called
adenosine in the brain and body and adenosine turns on the parasympathetic nervous system
suppresses the sympathetic nervous system when we sleep adenosine is pushed back down what
is caffeine caffeine effectively through some chemical steps blocks the effects of
adenosine so if you wait so here's a little trick if you that's i don't like the word hacks because
hacks imply using something for a purpose it wasn't designed for here we're talking about
hardwired biology but if you wake up in the morning and you didn't sleep quite as much
as you would have liked that means and you're sleepy that means you still have a buildup of
adenosine in your system let's say you immediately reach for caffeine great you suppress the action
of that adenosine and you will be more alert and guess what happens then the caffeine wears
off and the adenosine binds to the receptors with greater affinity and you have your afternoon crash
so a practice that's very useful to people is to delay the intake of caffeine by 60 to 90
minutes after waking allow the adenosine to be cleared out because it's not just cleared out
in sleep it's also cleared out in those kind of sleepy states of early morning so allow it
to be cleared out the other thing that clears it out exercise exercise so when you get up in the
morning you're kind of sleepy i don't want to do this i don't want to do this but you hydrate and
train you clear out the adenosine now i like to drink caffeine before i train her during training
i'm weak like that but for people that have an afternoon crash this can have tremendous benefits
of and maybe start by pushing it out 15 minutes per day most everyone that does this says oh my
goodness i didn't understand why in the afternoon i'm crashing so hard this will really really help
so let me ask you this i have a sense for you what time do you wake up typically generally between
well between 4 15 and 4 30. okay so for most people it's gonna be a little bit later
probably but for you that means so you're waking up if it's because of an alarm it's because of an
alarm but you're if that's your natural wake-up time now without an alarm that means that your
temperature is starting to rise at that time that's why you wake up that temperature increase
triggers that cortisol release now and that's why some people wake up right before their alarm clock
it's this cortisol pulse okay and two hours before that so for you approximately 2 30 in the morning
is what we call your temperature minimum it's when your temperature is lowest that it's ever going to
be in the 24 hour cycle so the way it works is you wake up because of an increase in core body
temperature that increase in core body temperature triggers that increase in cortisol and by viewing
light at that time you entrain you you ensure that it happens at the same time the next day the
clocks of your body are matched to this cortisol pulse so viewing bright light in the morning
anchors it when we say entrained it it tel through a circuit that involves cells in the eye and cells
in the hypothalamus which then talk to the rest of the cells of the body through a signal a peptide
that's released make sure that the temperature starts rising goes up up up up up and sometime
around two or three in the afternoon you're going to hit your temperature maximum you might feel a
little sleepy at that time but that's actually the time in which your gut your all your systems
are kind of revving at the maximum capacity and then it's going to start to drop and start
to drop drop drop now that drop in temperature eventually will be a full one to 3 degrees below
what your temperature maximum and that's when you're going to get sleepy and fall asleep
this is why it's important to keep the room cool at night to fall asleep
the goal here is to increase body temperature in order to be awake and to decrease body temperature
in order to be asleep if we stay with those themes a lot of this will just fall into bins
exercising will increase body temperature somewhat paradoxically getting into a cold shower or cold
water everyone says what must make you cold right well if you stay in there a long time
to become hypothermic right but let's remember the thermostat example you have a little area in
your brain called the medial pre-optic area and if you make the surface of your body cold guess what
happens core body temperature goes up so getting into so if you're going to do ice baths or cold
showers you can do i would say do them sometime better than not at all there's a beautiful paper
published in the european journal physiology in the year 2000 which took people and had them
sit they actually had them on lawn chairs in water a pool it's a great way to run an experiment
i always say people ask about cold showers they're not a lot of experiments on cold
showers because think about it's very hard to control is everyone under the shower the same
way et cetera you put someone up in water up to their neck it is you know what you're doing
so there's it's experimental rigor that drives that but they had people get into reasonably
cool water 60 degrees fahrenheit so it's not that cool but they had them stand for an hour
or they've had people get into very cold water something like 40 degrees for just 20 seconds
now here's what's really interesting that shock that you referred to is a adrenaline also called
epinephrine and it is released from the adrenals obviously but also from a site in the brain called
locus ceruleus a little area of the brainstem that then sprinklers the rest of the brain with
epinephrine and wakes up the rest of the brain so that shock occurs in the brain and the body and
actually the stuff in the body doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier so you're a two-part system
when those two systems are aligned it's beautiful when those two systems are out of alignment that's
not good so you get into cold water that's the shock for the first 30 seconds for most people who
are untrained your forebrain which is controlling decision making is basically suppressed in its
activity and other areas are ramped up so just know that exact panic just understand that passes
then what happens is when you get out of the cold whether or not it's a longer period at 60 degrees
or a short period i would hate to hear that people are only doing 20 seconds but maybe a minute to
three minutes at 45 degrees or something there's a long arc release of dopamine and epinephrine
that's what was shown in the study in humans because people always go well it's just in mice no
in humans and that long arc of dopamine leads to a near doubling or more of dopamine and epinephrine
in my colleague anna lembke's book called dopamine nation she works on addiction runs
our dual diagnosis addiction clinic at stanford she talked about a patient of hers that basically
helped himself get over cocaine addiction by doing cold baths because it was the only thing that
would give him the kind of dopamine release that even slightly mimicked his cocaine addiction and
allowed himself to wean himself off with a healthier behavior now i'm not saying it's the
equivalent of a drug like cocaine but i am saying that it's a better decision than than a drug like
cocaine for obvious reasons so that mood-enhancing effect that you feel afterwards it's real
it's based on a real neurochemical effect and that dopamine and epinephrine will
combine with the temperature increase from cortisol plus light plus exercise all things
that increase core body temperature now you've got increased core body temperature you created
a dopamine release epinephrine you've created a summer month inside your body in the in i don't
care if you live in minneapolis in the depths of winter or someplace even as cold as new hampshire
you are you are creating summer in your body by doing that now if you live in san diego or los
angeles or arizona and it's the summer and you're staying indoors and you're on your phone and
you're not doing any movement until the afternoon which is fine exercise in the afternoon i realize
there's some important benefits of that and you're laying in bed or you're just walking around the
kitchen and putting on sunglasses and driving to work guess what you're creating a colorado
winter inside of your body despite the fact that the sun is out so if you're wondering why you're
slightly depressed your metabolism is lower your testosterone output is slightly lower than maybe
you'd like it to be there could be other reasons too of course but again we're talking about
modulators i'm not saying getting sun in your eyes in the morning is going to make your testosterone
perfect what i'm saying is you're you're setting an internal milieu through things that increase
core body temperature dopamine epinephrine etc and that should be done relatively early in the day
thank you for joining for this special episode of after skool if you'd like to
learn more tools for mental health physical health and performance check out the huberman
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